The US has been exporting its inflation since 2008, mainly to the Middle East, now they are going to export some of back
THE Suez Canal Authority has announced that tolls for the waterway will be increased from May 1.

For general cargo, ro/ro and passenger vessels the increase will be three per cent. Containerships and vehicle carriers will have the least increase at two per cent.

According to a detailed new tariff structure the tolls will increase by five per cent for crude oil tankers, petroleum product tankers, chemical carriers and other liquid bulk carriers, LPG, LNG and dry bulk carriers, said a port news report from GAC.

The protesters are attempting to draw attention to their cause by blocking roads to a baseball stadium using their vehicles.

According to a news article posted on the website of El Imparcial news daily, protesters also claim the local and state government have committed acts of repression and violence against protesters, although the article does not give details.

#1
Send in the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) to break it up. Could be F&F weapons turning up any minute.

Within hours, the HRT had flown down to lower Alabama and set up a military style perimeter around "anti-government lunatic" Jimmy Lee Dykes' compound. Anyone notice how well State and Local law enforcement [those are the ones wearing proper police uniforms vs military attire] handled the highway traffic and kept the media away? Anyone notice the unmarked Ryder truck and green and purple helo's. Our Feds appear to have terminated the crazy, murdering, "anti-government" bastid too!

Should we be pleased, concerned, or both? Guess I'll just take notes and say a few prayers for the brave bus driver.

The price freeze applies to every product in all of the nation's largest supermarkets  a group including Walmart, Carrefour, Coto, Jumbo, Disco and other large chains. The companies' trade group, representing 70 percent of the Argentine market, reached the accord with Commerce Secretary Guillermo Moreno, the government's news agency Telam reported.

The smarter foreign retailers will now bail out...

The commerce ministry wants consumers to keep receipts and complain to a hotline about any price hikes they see before April 1.

Because a nation always does better by turning its citizens into snitches...

Polls show Argentines worry most about inflation, which private economists estimate could reach 30 percent this year.

Though it's illegal to say that in Argentina...

The government says it's trying to hold the next union wage hikes to 20 percent, a figure that suggests how little anyone believes the official index that pegs annual inflation at just 10 percent.

The government announced the price freeze on the first business day after the International Monetary Fund formally censured Argentina for putting out inaccurate economic data. The IMF has given Argentina until September to bring its statistics up to international standards, or face expulsion from the world body in November.

President Cristina Fernandez and her economy minister, Hernan Lorenzino, responded over the weekend with a flurry of attacks on the IMF, saying

the agency's data-gathering efforts had lost credibility in the lead-up to Argentina's historic 2001 debt default. They said IMF advice is leading Europeans astray by favoring big banks over measures that can grow economies out of crisis.

But what would the IMF know compared to a bunch of Argentinian bankers and politicians?

However, Lorenzino also said that the government will begin using a new inflation index starting in fourth-quarter 2013  just in time for the IMF's decision.

#6
as Via Meadia notes, Argentina is blessed with natural resources, good weather. It takes populist pols (Peronistas) and crackpot economics and blustery and inept military/gov't to keep it down. They've done a great job so far

A Communist Chinese warship last week directed "fire-control" radar and lit up a Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force destroyer in the East China Sea, where Japan and China are involved in a dispute over the ownership of a group of uninhabited islands, Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera said Tuesday.

As the radar activated was for targeting and the move could have set off an inadvertent but inevitable military clash, Japan lodged a protest with China in Tokyo and Beijing on Tuesday afternoon, just hours after Japan condemned China over the intrusion of two Chinese vessels into its territorial waters around the islands the previous day.

The radar beaming, which a Japanese government source said had occurred in waters off the Japanese-administered, Chinese-claimed Senkaku Islands, called Diaoyu in China, is all but certain to further heighten tensions between the two countries.

IMO unless the Bammer = USA is truly prepared + willing to militarily intervene on the side of Japan, + despite risk of HIGH us CASUALTIES + worst-case Limited or Full-scale NucWar agz Nuke-armed mainland China, THE BAMMER = USA MAY WANT TO MULL TURNING A BLIND EYE TO ANY COVERT JAPANESE MANUFACTURE OF NUCWEAPONS FOR ITS OWN ANTI-CHINA DEFENSE.

Perhaps more importantly, JAPAN's post-WW2 Constitution denies the JSDF any right to MILITARY PREEMPTION ANDOR UNILATERAL "FIRST-STRIKE". THE JSDF CAN FIGHT ONLY IFF ATTACKED - IT CANNOT LEGALLY ATTACK FIRST OR IN SURPRISE.

NUKE-ARMED CHINA, HOWEVER, SUFFERS NO SUCH RESTRICTION SAVE BY INTERNAL GOVT. CHOICE WHICH CAN EASILY CHANGE VIA NORMAL LEADERSHIP CYCLES.

OTOH USFJ + USFK + ASEAN do have a POTUS Bammer Admin which unfortunately many Amers proclaim NOT to trust to truly promote let alone defend or protect American or pro-US Allied interests???

Again, China supports both Okinawa-specific sovereign independence from Tokyo, or in the alternate substantial Okinawa political, econ autonomy from Tokyo where China is allowed a significant Trade, PLA presence on Okinawa.

[THEHILL] Trips to the gasoline pump in 2012 and 2008 took their biggest share of U.S. household income in several decades, according to the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA).Keep telling us the U.S. has a 1.7 percent inflation rate. We like consuming BS. We believe everything the govt tells us.
The Energy Department's statistical arm reported Monday that the average household spent $2,912 for gasoline in 2012, which makes up almost 4 percent of pre-tax income, tying 2008 for the highest percentage in roughly 30 years.

Pump prices took center stage in White House races in 2008 and 2012, but gasoline expenditures as a share of household income remain lower they did than the early 1980s, when they were above 5 percent.

Prices last year were elevated enough to push the share of household spending to the highest level in decades even though overall gasoline consumption has been declining for years.

A controversial British lawyer gave a speech in Ottawa despite protests from groups who oppose his opinion, which is that mosques should not be built in non-Muslim areas.

Gavin Boby spoke in front of 40 people at the central branch of the Ottawa Public Library Monday evening as protesters stood outside the building.

Boby is known for using zoning regulations to try to stop mosques from being opened in areas he considers "non-Muslim."

Before the speech, he said he does not want Islamic views to dictate certain neighbourhoods. He said, "Increasingly what we are seeing now is self-declared Muslim areas where you get Muslim patrols saying you can't walk a dog, wear a skirt."

A group that claimed it wants to "stop Muslims from taking over neighborhoods" organized Bobys speech. The Ottawa police hate crimes unit also monitored the talk.

Ihsaan Gardee, executive director with the Canadian Council on American-Islamic relation, said the library should have cancelled the visit. However the library said it only rented the auditorium out to the group and it made the group organizing Boby's speech sign an agreement not to violate criminal or human rights laws.

Some groups were not happy with the decision to let Boby speak. Gardee said, "By affording someone like this who has this kind of message, a publicly-funded taxpayer venue, it adds and gives a credibility to their message, which I don't think is something that should be considered lightly."

Library board chairwoman Jan Harder said she received hundreds of emails demanding the event be shut down, but she echoed the library's sentiment it can only be stopped if a law is broken. She said it is important to preserve freedom of speech.

[Dawn] Low immunisation coverage coupled with lack of public awareness and ineffectiveness of measles vaccine have resulted in death of about 100 children during the last two months of the previous year in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Federally Administered Tribal Areas, say paediatricians.

While talking to Dawn, they said that many of the affected children got infection as they were not vaccinated against measles. While many of the immunised children also developed measles because the vaccines they received were not effective, they added.

The health experts said that cold chain couldn't be maintained properly to store the vaccines in specified temperature that rendered the same ineffective and the recipients didn't get protection against measles.

According to paediatricians, measles has become a nationwide epidemic owing to government's focus on polio vaccination that left children vulnerable to other vaccine-preventable childhood diseases.

They said that measles killed children while polio handicapped them therefore priority must be accorded to control the former.

"Low vaccination coupled with lack of awareness on the part of parents results in death of children. Children up to the age of five years in the areas from where cases are being reported should be immunised immediately to put brakes on the epidemic," a senior pediatrician told Dawn.

The province has less than 40 per cent measles vaccination coverage that is lower than the 90 per cent, claimed by the health department.

[LATIMES] Rebels and the Myanmar government met Monday and agreed to continue talks in an effort to quell the violence that has roiled Kachin state.

The two sides met in the Chinese town of Ruili on the border with Myanmar, also known as Burma. They issued a statement pledging to open up channels of communication, defuse military tensions and create a monitoring system to enforce a cease-fire, according to the Reuters and Associated Press news agencies. Political talks, widely seen as key to any enduring peace, were also promised.

The ethnic Kachin rebels have met with government officials before, only to end up clashing with the army again. The new round of talks follows a recent escalation in fighting, which troubled the U.S. and the United Nations, as the government launched air attacks on the rebels. The army recently seized several key areas around the rebel headquarters in Laiza, strengthening its hand.

Clashes and government offensives have been reported even though President Thein Sein announced a unilateral halt to hostilities last month. Despite the talk of enforcing a cease-fire, it was unclear if a formal deal to do so was signed Monday, Reuters reported.

Rights activists were skeptical about the new discussions. "This is exactly what they did with the Kachin last time," promising "step-by-step talks leading to a political solution," said Myra Dahgaypaw, campaign coordinator for the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

That political solution never happened, Dahgaypaw said. "So much depends on how much the regime is willing to compromise," she said.

A rebel sergeant told the Irrawaddy magazine that the insurgents did not expect a swift resolution. "We hope there will be a truce so peace will come, but nobody thinks this is going to end soon," Kachin Independence Army Sgt. Brang Shawng told the publication Monday.

The Kachin rebels want greater autonomy. A long-standing truce with the government was shattered more than a year and a half ago, plunging the area into new bloodshed. Since then, the U.N. refugee agency estimates more than 88,000 people have been displaced by the conflict.

As George Glaigum7976 posted yesterday, Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" fits the situation. I vote we give the man what he wants.

[Al Ahram] President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday he is ready "to be the first man in space" under Iran's ambitious programme which aims to send a human being into orbit by 2020.

"Our youth are determined to send a man into space within the next four, five years, and I'm sure that will happen," he said during a ceremony in Tehran where two new Iranian-made satellites were unveiled, according to ISNA news agency.

"I'm ready to be the first Iranian to be sacrificed by the scientists of my country and go into space, even though I know there are a lot of candidates," Ahmadinejad quipped.

He added to the buoyant atmosphere, saying he was willing to "auction (himself) and donate" the money to the Iran's space programme, which has shrunk because of international economic sanctions over Tehran's controversial nuclear drive, ISNA reported.

The presidency website showed pictures of Ahmadinejad at the ceremony with what was purportedly Pishgam (pioneer), the monkey sent into orbit by Tehran last week.

The monkey's launch was presented by the Islamic republic as a first step towards sending a human into orbit by 2020.

Ahmadinejad unveiled on Monday two small satellites, named "Nahid" and "Zohreh" (Venus in Farsi and Arabic, respectively).

A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.